Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday May 02, 2012 @10:50AM
from the last-mile-conflict-of-interest dept.

suraj.sun writes with more fallout from Comcast's bandwidth caps that give preference to their own video services. From the article: "An executive from Sony said Monday that concerns about Comcast's discriminatory data cap are giving the firm second thoughts about launching an Internet video service, that would compete with cable and satellite TV services. In March,Comcast announced that video streamed to the Xbox from Comcast's own video service would be exempted from the cable giant's 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap. 'These guys have the pipe and the bandwidth,' he said. 'If they start capping things, it gets difficult.' Sony isn't the first Comcast rival to complain about the bandwidth cap. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has also blasted Comcast's discriminatory bandwidth cap as a violation of network neutrality. Comcast controls more than 20 percent of the residential broadband market, which means that Comcast effectively controls access to one-fifth of any American Internet video service's potential customers."

It was illegal until...if I recall correctly, the FCC commissioner approved it. Then, only a few months later, the commissioner resigned to take a high-paying top level exec job at Comcast. Its obvious what happened but unfortunately, this form of bribery is also legal so long as it can't be proven. Back on topic...these discriminatory data caps obviously do not promote competition in business...One could hardly call this capitalism.

Meredith Attwell Baker. Four months after approving the deal, she was hired to serve as senior vice president for government affairs for the Comcast-controlled NBC Universal. In other words, after approving the deal, she left the FCC to become one of Comcast's top lobbyists. I say get rid of all corporate lobbyists in Washington. They don't belong there.

Why in cases like this would vigilante justice be so wrong.When the government is compliant in the raping of the peoples rights and refuses to put these people away.

I do not want free shit from my government. I just want them to protect the playing field and make sure that the rules apply evenly.The government does not need to make us all the same. Just give us all the same chance.

I'd have no problem with that (including the Congressman heading the MPAA). But I don't think we've reached that point yet. This order:
Soap box
Jury box
Ballot box
Ammo box (last resort)

Soap box - we've been trying this for a long time
Jury box - can't, no one will pass laws limiting their corrupt coworkers because they do not want to limit their future corrupt behavior
Ballot box - wow, we've tried, again and again, but the obvious corruption doesn't stop [philly.com]
Ammo box - well.... hate to say it, but here we are, this is all that is left.....

Voting is done by the masses and the dead.
Ammo will soon be illegal. (Guess why)

In any jurisdiction where a machine sits between the voter and the offical count, no election outcome can be trusted.
"the people" as in "Government, of the people, by the poeple for the people" have been disenfranchised for decades.
The situation now is more along the lines of "Government of the powerless, by the stooges, for the elite"

There are no candidates for office anywhere in the "free" world that are not controlled by corporations & their cartels, trade unions or organized crime.Even if suffic

Yes, Ron Paul. The same Ron Paul that believes if a free market allows a monopoly to exist, it should be allowed. And would approve of Comcast's behavior because if it shouldn't happen, the free market would have sorted it all out.

Ron Paul, while an interesting candidate, would scare the hell out of me if he ever got elected President due to his naive beliefs in the free market and removal of all regulation.

In the 1930s I imagine people would have believed you. They were dealing with crimes involving automatic weapons and would have welcomed that. Zoning and land use restrictions were already in place.

No crosses being visible is not a rule anywhere unless the taxpayer is paying for it. It was the rule then as well, just not enforced against the dominate religion. Thankfully today we recognize that it does apply to all religions equally.

What is it about conservative/authoritarian political movements that causes them to do this? The Nazis were convinced they were being persecuted by Jews even as they stuffed them into ovens en masse. Apartheid South Africans were convinced they were being persecuted by dark-skinned Africans. And of course American conservolibertarians are convinced that the rich are being persecuted by the poor, men are being persecuted by women, Christians are being persecuted by homosexuals, whites are being persecuted by minorities, etc.

It's not just that they are convinced they are victims. They are convinced they are victims when precisely the opposite is happening. I cannot fathom the level of delusion necessary to make people think this way, but it seems that every major conservative political movement does this.

Conservatives believe in a conservative approach to government (imagine that). Extreme conservatism is a very small, relatively weak government. Extreme liberalism is a large, powerful government.

That's not what they mean at all. A theocracy or absolute monarchy would be a very conservative form of government, yet hardly weak. Opposition to gay rights, abortions, racial equality etc. are also conservative positions, yet they involve greater government control over people than their liberal opposition.

Yes, we need to get rid of lobbyists, but the phenomenon you speak of is a different animal. If lobbying were illegal, then she would have received some other cushy job at NBC Universal. This whole "screw over the voters/taxpayers for Acme Corp, then get a cushy job with Acme Corp" routine happens in just about every part of the government, even the military.

What we need to do is make it illegal for any high-ranking government employee to get a job with any corporation that is regulated by or a contractor for that employee's position. Generals can't get jobs with military contractors, FTC execs can't get jobs with Wall Street firms, FAA execs can't get jobs with airlines, etc., etc.

I know what I am proposing sounds draconian, but this tactic has an incredibly corrupting influence over government, and this is the only thing I can think of to put an absolute stop to it. If anyone has any other ideas, I'm more than willing to listen.

>>>It was illegal until...if I recall correctly, the FCC commissioner approved it. Then, only a few months later, the commissioner resigned to take a high-paying top level exec job at Comcast.

Wow.Sony just needs to sue Comcast.The Sherman Antitrust law is still in effect, forbids companies from using their monopoly or near-monopoly for unfair competitive advantage, and the FCC can't overrule that law.

Sadly, in this case, a document (electronic or dead tree) or recording from Comcast offering the job on the condition that the merger is approved. Of course, everybody knows this so they make sure no such document or recording ever comes into existence.

Personally, I'm for getting rid of all lobbyists period but, there should, at least, be a conflict of interest gap, say 10 years, between being a government official or elected representative and being able to work for the organizations you had dealings with while you held that position.

Personally, I'm for getting rid of all lobbyists period but, there should, at least, be a conflict of interest gap, say 10 years, between being a government official or elected representative and being able to work for the organizations you had dealings with while you held that position.

I like your idea but congress and the senate would never approve such a bill.

This is a difficult issue, not as straight forward as you might think.

There was no problem when the distributors who owned licenses to broadcast over the airwaves were the ones who also provided the content.

There was no problem when the distributors who owned cable networks were the ones who also provided the content.

But all of a sudden because the internet is involved, its now an issue - but only in that very select portion of the distributor/provider area, its still not an issue in the above scenarios.

What you mean to complain about is when content providers and distributors now have a general access product - an ISP element. Thats the problem here.

What I want to know is whether Comcast have actually denied Sony or anyone else the right to put a service end point within the Comcast network, and run a private line back to their main servers - in the same manner as the Comcast Xbox service - or have refused to exempt such a setup in the same manner. Anyone?

The real problem is that consumers have little to no choice of internet providers due to government regulations. In my area, I basically have the choice between Comcast and no internet. That isn't really a choice so they have a monopoly. The government is supposed to break up and prevent monopolies, not enforce and encourage them. If there were more providers they would be heavily incentivized to have no cap so that they could snatch up mine, and countless others, business from Comcast. I would gladly switch to such a provider and be willing to pay more for the service. We have no such alternative, that is the problem.

"The government is supposed to break up and prevent monopolies, not enforce and encourage them."

Welcome to the world of Mercantile Corporatism sponsored by Government. Nearly all attempts at "fixing" the problem of Government being in bed with Corporations results in corporations manipulating government even more.

That can certainly be true if the government does not enforce laws about bullying, fraud, etc. With the government enforcing basic contract law and basic "don't break my knee caps because I'm competing with you" law it is impossible for monopolies to last and nearly impossible for them to form in the first place. If a monopoly is abusing or gauging their customers, customers will be willing to give their money to someone else who will treat them better, as always. People like money. People will try to f

This is not government regulation... this is LACK of government regulation. Get it right for once.

It's funny, I live in a small country (Finland) with only 5.2 million people, but I have a choice of at least a dozen internet providers and mobile operators (individually, not combined). Every time I visit the US, it seems at best you have 2 or 3 sources for either and none of them are good. Here we have real competition, good prices and good service. No caps either on broadband or mobile. You have unregulated free market capitalism that is running crazy, but not in a good way.

It's not really the same thing. When broadcast radio and TV "distributors" push their own content and suppress that of others, you have the choice to tune to a different channel. When an Internet operator pushes their own content at the cost of others, you're almost certainly screwed because it's very unlikely that you have a choice to not use Comcast. There is a valid analogy with Cable TV - but that's regulated, they have no choice but to carry all of the local TV stations.

It's also more subtle. They aren't banning SONY from transmitting data over their network - they're just imposing bandwidth caps.

This is clearly a bad thing - we *seriously* need net neutrality legislation to avoid this kind of problem.

No, you don't need network neutrality, you need competition - the whole network neutrality issue is only an issue because there doesn't seem to be healthy competition within the US market.

In the UK market, we have BT as the main incumbent, Virgin Media as a secondary incumbent and a heavily regulated resale market.

Anyone here can buy capacity from BT, anything from a single provisioned ADSL line to a full unbundled service (you get the last mile, and then you can do whatever you wish with it) - and the costs of all of that are heavily regulated, to the point where BT Wholesale cannot charge BT Retail less than they charge Joe Blogs Internet Company.

However, Virgin Media as the lesser incumbent is under no such limitations - you cannot rent capacity on the Virgin Media network at all, other than as an end customer. They have a nice fiber and cable network, but you as an independent ISP cannot get access to that - so its very much like the US market.

So we end up with the situation where we have a huge competitive ADSL based market, but a minute cable market. Network neutrality is protected by the fact that literally anyone can go and get capacity from BT, and have it available pretty much anywhere in the UK - BT cannot impose limitations on your usage as a network provider, so they cannot force you to not be network neutral.

It would make more sense for the State government to install 50-optical fiber bundles through the streets (which they already own), and then lease 1 fiber per company. Then customers could choose Comcast or Cox or Time-Warner or MSN or AppleTV or.....

Real choice. And we could tell comcast to "fuck off" when they invent these stupid 250 GB caps to effectively make Hulu, Amazon, Sony video streaming useless.

As long as they apply the same rules to everyone, it could be considered neutral to not count "internal" traffic towards the cap. My own ISP has said that their upstream internet costs are significant and growing so this isn't so far-fetched.

The logical solution is for Sony to install a local caching server inside the Comcast network--if Comcast were to prevent that, then it would violate net neutrality.

>>>There was no problem when the distributors who owned licenses to broadcast over the airwaves were the ones who also provided the content.

They didn't.Local stations hold the licenses, not the content creators. And O&O stations are limited to only 10 max for NBC, ABC, etc. It was strictly regulated to separate the ~6000 station owners from the central content creators.

>>>There was no problem when the distributors who owned cable networks were the ones who also provided the content.

The comcast claim that they have to limit outside video providers like Hulu or Amazon or Sony to 250 GB, but their own internet video service can be unlimited, is bullshit. It's the same lines leading into my house. There is no difference except an excuse (per usual) to limit consumer choice. It's the same thing that Microsoft did when they installed IE as Win95's default and blocked installs of other browsers or DR-DOS (though they later relented).

I was just before the start date of MSNBC.
About 10 to 15 years ago.
When Bill Gates wanted to produce a set top box.
It was deemed a conflict of interest.
Bill Got mad, I assume, and bought 40% of both
Comcast and NBC. Thus the birth of MSNBC
and a big cable player to carry it.
Today MS has a set top box its called the X-box.

So you can see its not hard to get the votes
for things like Merger when one party holds big
piles of shares. You can almost expect random
votes to push you over 50%.

The obvious American solution: Comcast buys Sony in a leveraged buyout. Execs get big bonuses. Provides metered services to Sony content and products at a rate slightly less ruinous than what they charge for competitors. Obligatory layoffs at Comcast and Sony. Comcast products are distributed with integral Sony rootkits and DRM.

Wait a couple of years. Comcast decides Sony is dead weight. Lays off more people, execs get big performance bonuses. Sells off Sony. Execs get big retention bonuses. Sony lays off m

Your post implies that shenanigans should be illegal. Where do you think you going with this?

The whole idea of a business competition is to abuse/exploit/break/violate existing rules in a more industrious (and that's the etymology of the word "industry" for you right there in this adjective) way than your competitor.

Corporations may be became people now, but that does not mean that Supreme Court decree also enriched them with morals.

Comcast has been up to no good for years. We all remember the torrent throttling and god knows what else. They need to have the thumb screws put to them so they stop trying to squeeze every penny out of every MB by throttling traffic, applying data caps and the like. I hate Comcast's business practices but they're usually pretty damn fast.... there needs to be another choice. 20% is too large for a dickweed company that pulls this bull-shlaka.

Don't forget about them degrading VoiP traffic when they deployed their own voice service. That warranted an investigation by the government, which they were found in the wrong. No penalty for that finding, mind you.

Don't allow Comcast the rights to broadcast Sony properties, including working with PS Network. I'm sure Comcast would concede.

Ahh and there's the beauty of it. Who would you believe to be violating some form of neutrality, if you were watching a hulu/youtube/redtube;) clip and it was blocked to you by the content owner because they didn't like your choice of ISP?

The thing is Comcast simply said "Oh normal data is so expensive, woe is us! But we're able to provide XFINITY content through a magical data pipe that doesn't need to worry about this!" With that, it becomes Sony's (and Netflix's!) fault for obviously creating (or having, in Netflix's case) a product that uses up so much magical interpipe juice.

Although what you say is very true, aside from signing distribution deals with Xfinity, the only way for the content providers to not get reamed (in the ATT pays Apple per iPhone sold sense), is to play some form of hardball with the ISPs. But my example of what the public perception would look like is exactly why these companies are taking the more passive and whiny route for now.

How evil! Apple actually makes AT&T pay for their product? The DoJ better step in to right this heinous wrong! This isn't fair to alll those other phone manufacturers lose out on tons of revenue since they obviously give their phones away to AT&T for free.

If you had any common sense, or were awake for the last half of a decade, you'd understand where my ATT+iPhone comparison was coming from, especially in regards to how a company could sell their product (either content for Netflix and Sony, or monthly phone service for ATT) to a large number of customers and still end up making very little profit due to their "partners".

"Aragon reportedly said Sony was 'waiting on clarity'...about whether regulators would allow Comcast to exempt its own video services from the broadband cap."

This is probably how discussion on Net Neutrality starts. Hopefully this leads to some sort of law forcing ISPs to provide real evidence to justify implementing any sort of bandwidth cap.

As it stands, it's all bullshit. The difference between a light and a heavy user, as far as the ISP is concerned, is that the heavy user continues downloading/browsing/streaming heavily on off-peak hours (read: overnight). About the only major cost for the ISP, assuming they even HAVE the capability to lower their system capacity at night, would be the extra power usage for their network hardware, and even THAT becomes substantially cheaper at night.

As this is Slashdot:

It's like charging cars by the number of hours spent on the road because of traffic congestion, and as a result, taxing cars at a heavier rate for driving at 3 in the morning, when there's no congestion to contribute to.

Why would Comcast want to agree to net neutrality now? They've just shown the value of being able to dictate the terms of use to people intending to serve data over the internet. They'll probably strike a deal with Sony where Sony pays them several million a year and in exchange doesn't get hit by Comcast's data caps. It's a huge new untapped revenue stream for an ISP. The fact that they can decide not to play ball with companies that might compete with its own cable service is just icing on the cake. You can bet that Comcast's senators are getting well greased right now and are ready to go to bat to prevent anything like Net Neutrality from ever really being implemented.

I can see the ads already. The government is trying to tell the internet how to operate! Call your senator today and tell him you don't want big government interfering in the Internet!

The major issue with traffic* caps is that they need expanding periodically to keep up with the fact that people's expectations grow. Ironically, I see more evidence that operators are reducing traffic caps rather than increasing them. Look at T-Mobile: Unlimited, replaced by 10Gb, replaced by 5Gb, and now they're encouraging people to go to 2G. Wait, what?

* The correct term is traffic. Bandwidth measure of information per second. Ethernet cable has a bandwidth cap.

I'm about to get a new laptop. As soon as I do, I'm going to be loading in the range of 300-600GB as fast as my connection will allow - probably 1-3 days, depending on how fast my off-peak bandwidth is. All entirely legal, from my Steam account and MSDNAA account, and at least one Linux distro to dual-boot.

All I have to say is thank GOD I don't have Comcast anymore. Verizon's cellular division is as bad as any other (worse, even, in some respects), but their fiber-to-the-home division hasn't yet given me an

I remember when Comcast put on the extremely low 250GB caps per month, a lot of people around here said that anybody using more than 250GB a month was probably a pirate.

Does anybody still believe that?

What 250GB caps really means is that your ISP won't invest in infrastructure, because its expensive.

It may have been slightly more true in some cases back then, but let's see:1) GOG.com2) Steam3) Origin4) XBLA/PSN demos, games and videos5) Netflix instant watch6) An occasional Linux ISO7) Everything else

I've probably forgotten a few things, but I see it as pretty easy to hit 250GB on some months, even if not every month (seriously, if you bought Dragon Age complete pack from Amazon.com when it was on sale, that is 40 GB or more worth of downloading for those two games alone!).

For me it isn't a true cap.. at 250GB in month for the third month, I get hit with $2 per GB over fee. Been that way for the last 2 years.

Funny thing is.. in 2 years time the most I've ever pulled in a month was 160 GB.. that includes me working from home using the connection 8-18 hours a day running multiple vpns and ssh sessions, along with another 6-8 devices on constantly (3 of which are doing email/facebook/myspace/bebo/itunes for wife and daughter) and we collectively timeshift about 15 hours wor

You will receive a notice the first time your usage exceeds the data plan. We will send you alerts if your usage approaches or exceeds the amount of data included in your plan. If you exceed your monthly data plan a third time we'll charge you $10 for each additional 50 GB of data provided to you that month. You'll be charged $10 for every incremental 50 GB of usage beyond your plan.

Let's hope that this will draw more attention to the issue of caps in general, and biased caps in particular, as being detrimental to things that ordinary people want to use, and big companies want to sell.

"Net Neutrality" is a confusing thing to most people, but "Sony won't sell you videos on demand because of Comcast's biased data caps" is much easier. I think even Congresscritters might be able to understand that one.

I got modded "offtopic" but I find that Sony being upset at Comcast's abuse of the market the height of irony. I'd have sympathy for Sony if they didn't, for example, put DRM on their media and play format shenanigans. But they do, and I don't.

Comcast and Sony can go at it in a one-on-one caged death-match and I can only hope that both die.

If they want to have the advantages of a common carrier - free access to rights of way, and a monopoly on services, then they better behave like a content neutral common carrier. If they want to take the attitude that it's their network and they can control it any way they want, then they can also negotiate rights-of-way individually with the millions of property owners whose land their cables cross.

Eventually it will come down to capping speed or total usage. I don't think the backbone infrastructure is designed to handle so much traffic, and I doubt Comcast is willing to spend millions on upgrading.

One good example is Cox in Phoenix. They have one of the most capable systems and most recently upgraded, at least according to subcontractors and employees I have talked to.

Their configuration is a fiber link from the head end to each neighborhood node. This link runs at 1-3GB with the newer ones at 3GB. It might be possible to run this link in the future at (maybe) 10GB but that would require a lot of new hardware at both ends. Connected to the node are either 500 or 1000 homes - they are splitting up the 1000-home nodes to make 500-home nodes, but that is as far as they are going. You can expect a lot of systems in the US to be running 1GB to the node and 1000 homes on the node.

A little simple division makes the problem pretty clear. Assuming there is no cable TV anymore on the head end to node link that means there is 3GB available to 500 homes in the best areas and in the oldest, slowest areas it is 1GB for 1000 homes. That is 6Mb/sec best case for every house or 1Mb/sec at the worst. There is no more capacity that that.

Oh, and the cable TV offerings are taking a pretty big slice of that bandwidth today, so it is far more likely that even in the best areas there is a max of 1Mb/sec to 500 homes - if they are all using it. For the last five years or so it has worked wonderfully because 1 in 10 (or more likely 50) homes was using any sort of streaming IPTV service. So instead of 1Mb/sec per home it worked out to be more like 10Mb/sec for the homes using it. The rest? Just email and web surfing. Now, you move 50% of the homes to trying to use IPTV services and the whole system collapses - the bandwidth simply isn't there. And, it is unlikely that it will be any time soon. The last time the cable systems were upgraded it took about 10 years from start to end. Maybe if we are lucky by 2020 we could have guaranteed 20Mb/sec to every home on the cable system which would require a 100GB fiber link from the node to the head end. I don't know about you, but I don't think there is any 100GB link that goes any distance.

Maybe what is required is a separate fiber run from every house to the head end. Yeah, that would work. You can get that today if you don't mind spending about $3K a month and I don't think it is going to get a lot cheaper any time soon.

Thank you. My dad lived in a test city for a second cable provider way nack when. AT&T came in to challenge Comcast. Cost plummeted and suddenly the cable box was replaced wih a nice modern digital one with fiber optic.

In a lot of places businessea and politicians gang up using the old socialist fraud that tere isn't enough market for something and therefore government gets to pick one business to win, and uses its guns to keep competition out.

Sounds like a straight-up case of anti-competitive business practice and why content producers in the content delivery business should be fairly and soundly regulated if they're allowed in the first place.

In the UK this would doubtlessly be referred to the Competition Comission.

I always think about over the air (OTA) broadcast and not have to deal with streaming video issues (throughput, routers, IP addr conflicts, bandwidth issues, data dropouts, corp shenenigans, etc.) though antennas can be a pain particularly if you are living in a condo. OTA already exists but TV stations are garbage these days, I remember in 20th century when local TV stations played movies (older movies when women dressed like women).

These caps are super anti-competive in areas where companies like Comcast have exclusive franchise agreements that prevent other companies from offering uncapped high speed cable based internet. Sounds like a good reason to quit bitching to the FCC and start complaining about the uncompetitive behavior to the cable franchise boards instead...

Is there an advantage to having the media libraries inside Comcast's network so that Comcast does not need to pay at their border? Does Comcast get charged upstream for their bandwidth?Also, Comcast wants to serve media via its xfinity web offerings. Cannot Sony leverage that since many of those titles will belong to Sony?

OK, let's say you work out a deal with a McDonalds to sell you hamburgers at half price as long as you buy 100 at a time. So you set up a stand across from the McDonalds and start selling hamburgers cheaper than McDonalds does. You have incredible sales for the first week or so.

Of course, based on that you get a couple of friends to loan you money to expand your business and start trying to negotiate a similar deal with a different McDonalds across town.

Comcast has 22.8 million subscribers. They have a market cap of 87 billion. So that is $3815 dollars per household, Spread over 2 years that is $158.00 probably exactly what you are paying right now. Just fucking buy the assholes out. Fire all the executives and turn it into a coop.

There probably is something else here, and Sony may just using Comcast's capping as an excuse...

a) Comcast's cap is not a "cap and charge overages", but a "cap, warn, and terminate or get them to upgrade to uncapped business service": Actually enforcing the cap for Comcast is very costly, because they lose customers. This makes it far less anticompetitive than other caps, but really targeted against abuse of service.

b) Comcast's cap is reasonably large. Netflix's HD stream is ~1.8 GB/hour, and other streams are less. So a 250 GB cap is >4.5 hours of HD video a day through streaming, which is a LOT.

I have a serious problem with other ISP's much lower "Cap and Overage" model, where the goal is to use the cap to increase revenue. And such caps are far more likely to be anticompetitive.

I suspect its Sony having issues with TV networks and other interests, and they are using Comcast's cap as an excuse.

Get their business service branded as Business Class. Pretty much the same price without any new sign-up discounts, no contracts, no credit checks, no caps, 4hr resolution SLA, generally burst speeds are higher for longer, and you can run your own server within the TOS. Sure you have to lease their crummy SMC router/cable modem at $7/mo or go find yourself a SB6120. The down sides are it's a completely different account, your house will get classified as a business address in their DB, their CSRs can get confused at times even though I call the residential number for my TV service and the business number for the internets.

If they start asking a whole lot of questions of why you're not getting their residential service, just say you work from home and may hit that residential cap. If you have their residential TV as well, you'll still get adverts for their residential internet service.

I was previously living that experiment. I had no cable TV, freeloaded off of open wifi (the neighborhood was replete), and got all my TV shows via downloads. The wife supplemented the things I downloaded with some Hulu, and we had TONS of shows and movies via Netflix to round things out. For certain big things, like the Lost finale (what a disappointment), I would get the antenna set up just so, and watch via OTA HD. It was nice.

Now we've moved out to a more rural setting. There are ZERO OTA channels avail

Netflix hasn't jacked up their rates. Their rate for streaming only has been the same as I have always paid. If you are talking about splitting the DVD off of streaming, well, I used to do the DVDs, but Netflix screwed up and now I am streaming only. I find I can get whatever DVD I want from other sources online. Hulu locking out people without cable is no big surprise since they are owned by NBC/Comcast. I knew that was coming someday as soon as the merger was approved - by the person who is now a lobbyist

I think we're arguing semantics now. I was signed up for three DVDs, one with Bluray (for my movies), plus streaming. I was paying around 25$ per month. After the 'split off', they were going to force me to have all three discs upgraded to Bluray default, or none at all. To offset that 'win', my monthly rate was going to almost DOUBLE. Even if I dropped Blurays entirely, I'd still be looking at more than 1.5X the cost. Only if I dropped physical discs entirely would my price drop. Netflix's catalog is cut t

I was only doing 1 DVD and streaming and I think i was paying $10 a month. After Netflix decided to be stupid, I went to streaming only - I wasn't about to be strong armed into paying double - and now I pay $9 a month. So the net result is Netflix is getting $1 less from me now. I don't watch very much new TV - maybe 2 or 3 shows, so I find the the older tv series on netflix is great. I can watch a ton of last seasons TV shows and it doesn't bother me I don't get to see them live. I do the opposite that you

250GB is less than 4 hours of HD content per day, if you do nothing else with the internet at all.

This is almost an argument in favor of bandwidth caps. If there weren't some checks and balance then idiots like you would stream RAW video all day. No one streams RAW video, not even via satellite. If you want porn that realistic rent a hooker.